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Description of problem: When running alpine on our mail server (i.e. INBOX is /var/spool/mail/ben and other folders are in ~ben/mail/) it is impossible to save a message into INBOX (i.e. /var/spool/mail/ben); instead, it is saved into ~ben/mail/inbox. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): alpine-1.10-4.fc9.i386 How reproducible: Always. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run alpine on the mail server, i.e. accessing inbox in /var/spool/mail/ben and other folders in ~ben/mail/ directly, NOT via IMAP or POP. 2. Hit L to get the folder list, then select a folder other than INBOX. 3. Select a message from this folder, hit S to save it, and put in INBOX as the folder. Actual results: Alpine complains that: "Folder "inbox" doesn't exist. Create?" If you hit N, the save fails. If you hit Y, the message is saved into ~ben/mail/inbox. Expected results: No prompt is given (since INBOX exists, of course). The message is saved into /var/spool/mail/ben. Additional info: Note that alpine *does* know about INBOX. You can select the folder from the folder list (and get the actual inbox). When saving the message you can use tab completion, and it'll correctly fill in INBOX for you, or you can use ^T to get a list of folders and select INBOX from that. But the end result is the same - it tries to make a new folder called inbox to put the message in. Clearly alpine is not supposed to work this way, since if you connect via IMAP (even to localhost) you *can* save messages back into INBOX correctly. So either alpine should work in the same fashion for local spool, or if saving to inbox isn't possible for some reason, it should not allow you to select that mailbox in the first place! Our users report that they used to be able to save messages back into INBOX in this fashion with our previous pine RPM (from the Dag repo).
I could be wrong, but I don't think pine or alpine ever supported saving to /var/spool/... For our local site, a work around is to create an INBOX in users' home directory. install uw-imap-utils and (as the user) create a mix folder $ mailutil create '#driver.mix/INBOX'
When an inbox lives in the users' homedir, new mail gets moved there before reading (when using imap anyway). Well, when using uw-imap anyway.
Ben: Have you tried hitting Control-P while in the Save dialog? I think that *might* do it.
Oh, maybe that only works when you have multiple incoming folders defined. Rats. However, I'm not sure this is a Fedora-specific issue.
Thanks for the followup! Regarding comment #1, I said in the original bug report that pine *did* support saving to /var/spool/ - although it's entirely possible this was a Dag-specific patch rather than something in Pine upstream. We can't use the proposed workaround because that would confuse the IMAP clients that some of our users also use. I also don't want to mess with our mail system to placate one broken client. Regarding comment #4, sure, it may not be Fedora specific, in which case this can be pushed upstream. For now, I can train my users that "saving into INBOX doesn't work" so that they don't do it (or they use mutt). But it would be nice if Alpine either allowed it or didn't tab-complete to INBOX or show it when I hit ^T if it's not going to let me save there.
I might also suggest asking on the alpine-info mailing list. I also have never used alpine to access /var/spool/mail/$USER but I think some others do that. Rex or Jima, care to own this bug?
I've reported the problem upstream on alpine-info: http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/alpine-info/2008-July/001009.html
It is not clear to me whether the alpine dev team got to this bug, but they did say they were working on it: http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/pipermail/alpine-info/2008-July/001009.html So, would you mind testing against alpine 2.00: su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update alpine' You can provide feedback for the update here: http://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F8/FEDORA-2008-7290 Please let me know if this fixes the bug. If you find any unrelated bug, please file on the alpine 2.00 update bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=460332#c14
According to http://www.washington.edu/alpine/changes/1.10-to-2.00.html it looks like they did fix it: Bugs that have been addressed in this release include: ... * Save to a local default INBOX failed if the primary collection was also local, which it is by default. The save went to ~/mail/inbox instead. I just tested the update on our system, and it works for us.
Yipee! Thanks for report, I love closing fixed bugs.
alpine-2.00-1.fc9 has been pushed to the Fedora 9 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.